Balschoiw

Frohe Weihnachten ! Santa has lost some parcels on the way for your delightment. Those parcels are for OFP fans exclusively. Hope you have fun with: OFP classic cellphone ringtone pack ~ 3.1 MB A compilation of ringtones from OFP quotes and music. Ringtones are present in those file-formats: AMR, MMF, MP3 Have fun while reviving the good old OFP feeling on your cellphone. All the best, Balschoiw No external hosting needed or wanted. Ask for permission.

I´m not impressed with the Ipad. It has no USB, no slot for Memory cards, no external connectors. This is what I really love with my netbook. I have it with me on all travels, can insert the SD card of my camera and instantly use the photos or use the firewire interface to transfer the videos from my videocam. The USB slot is needed to connect external drives and a mobile DVD burner or the bluetooth device to connect my mobile phone or just a stick to swap some music. There are no interfaces like that with the IPad at all and that´s really a big deficit imo. Those things need to be mobile, compact and connective. Ipad lacks big time in the last compartement and therefore will not be bought by me. Stylish or not, it´s the functionality that counts for me.

I´ve learned to play the piano when I was a youth but only own a Korg M1 and a DX7 now to use them for midi-recording. You can check out some of my stuff on my myspace page: Notfallplan

So you´re ok with it ? If you take the time you´ll find out that the numbers are steadily rising, this is a tribute to the way wars a fought today in comparison to conflicts decades ago. Still, there´s hardly any intitiative to compensate that development and support the vets. Waving flags and vocally supporting the troops does not help them in the aftermath. Actions to change the governmental support and responsibility do. As a matter of fact this is the new generation of veterans we´re talking about here. It´s your neighbours, your friends, your schoolmates. And yes, they are left behind today. @Clavicula_nox4817: I applaud your effort and goals but there are so many vets that are simply dropping through the system as they lack your personal strength or simply have been altered by the things they experienced so much that they will never get back on track again. As long as PTSD is seen as a personal deficit among the military personel, people will go on killing themselves as they are to afraid to expose themselves and ask for proper treatment within a bureaucratic process of the VA, especially if you keep in mind that traumatized people lack the energy to "fight" through the machine. Also keep in mind that such problems do not arise instantly, they grow over time. Anyway, I hope you now can understand why I see the flag-incident the thread is about more as an anecdote than a serious problem. Totally agreed, we could extend the list for ages, still my highlighting was on the current US situation for veterans.

I´m sure you could find out easily by yourself but here you go: 1. One in five US soldiers returning home suffers from PTSD 2. TBI (traumatic brain injuries) make up a total of 22 percent of the injuries, that´s twice high than during/after the vietnam war. 3. A Stanford University study found that 700.000 of 2.000.000 soldiers having served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from PTSD or TBI. That´s a total of 36 percent. 4. IAVA (Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America) has a pretty straight opinion on the aftermath costs of war participation and the money needed to support injured or traumatized soldiers: IAVA’s Paul Rieckhoff Joined CNN to Discuss Impact of Afghan Plan on Vets 5. The suicide rate among US soldiers has doubled since 2001 according to Peter Chiarelli, Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army. This doesn´t come out of nowhere. According to him at least 900 therapeuts and additional psychologists are needed to support the troops and to treat the vast amount of veterans who suffer from a palette of mental or bodily injuries. There´s no additional money for it though. 6. The unemployment rate among veterans is 2 points higher than among regular citizens. 7. The number of veterans loosing their homes is 4 times higher than among regular citizens. 8. Veterans have to wait years for compensation or proper medical treatment as the deciding authority, the VA is underfinanced and not fit to handle such big numbers of veterans who are in need of instant help and support. Families of soldiers who commited suicide do not even get the usual predidential condolences. This alone shows how their lives and deaths are valued by the government and the society. Hope that helps.

OMG, yes...i´ll give you the deadnock. World peace !

Playing Shift now for about 2 weeks. With real car mod and damage mod it´s a real blast. Enemy AI is a tad to deadly imo but the look, feel, handling and general race impression is a blast. Need to install the latest patch though. With custom G25 setup from the indarneds it plays great. Still trying to beat 6.20 on Nordschleife though... Hehe...those screens are really supershrinked Maddmatt :-) Get the setups for the G25 and links to the other realistic mods at nogripracing. Cheers.

Ir´s not only important what resolution the device has, even more important is the reaction time of the display used in the device. Most of them are not very fast unfortunally so playing on them or watching fast movie scenes get´s washy. Basically the regular 300-500 Euro beamers are using stripped TFT displays with all of their limitations. This means they are not good at displaying fast paced action. Picture gets washy. If I were you I´d sit back for a few more years and wait for laser beamers for gaming. They are catching up production-wide and deliver incredible great pictures, no matter what surface you project upon. Using a regular beamer will force you into either buying silver-tipped cinema paint for your wall or using a retractable screen. On regular walls the result looks shit. I have a self-built beamer for movies, gaming is not my choice with it. Last year I got my hands on one of those old beamers for concerts with 3 little TV´s in it and some monsterlenses. That one is really good for gaming and the picture is great as it is an per pixel picture. The only problem is that it weights a ton and needs some serious adjustment for every lens when relocated. Your wife will hate you for the size and love you for the picture :-) Seriously, give it some time. Else you´ll waste money without proper results.

Yawn... Where ist the initiative when it comes to people who suffer from traumatas caused by the latest conflicts ? You got about 40.000 US people who fail to reintegrate, who get left behind by the system, the community, their families, the govenrment and you make a big fuzz about an old man who fails to comply to a contract ? You got bigger problems to worry about. Seriously, as much as it may harm that old man, it´s a joke compared to the real problems Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have to face in the US of A today... Better put your initiative there... And not about some stupid flag thingie....

It´s actually the same rig ;-)

No..not at all :-) The cabin movement is there to simulate g-force. It works pretty well this way . If you step on the gas the cockpit is tilted back to simulate positive g as in a real car. When applying brake forces it tilts to the front to simulate negative g as it is in real life aswell. It´s not meant to simulate the actual movemt of the car..ok it does additionally , but the big movements are there for the g-forces. Imagine sitting in a dark cabin with this simulator and only the monitor is visible. The illusion will be perfect :)

I love DIY cockpits and simulators. I love to build stuff on my own and a full motion g-simulating setup is something I really like to build on my own. As I´m more into racesims something like this is very tempting for me: You can check out a lot of impressive DIY projects over at Racesimcentral If you got enough money you can always go for a Force Dynamics rig:

It is an SDK :-) Large scale streaming terrains will hardly be possible with Unity. You can create fractal rendered terrain but this comes with logical limitations. Whoopie...2.6 is out. Iphone Unity is not included with Unity Pro Version afaik and has to be licensed separately. Still I´ve done 3 projects so far with Untiy 2.5 Pro and it really rocks for the price you have to pay. Compared to other 3d engines the workflow is much, much faster and the bang for the buck you get is incredible...if you are aware of the limitations. I´m off to check the new version :)

I usually embedd a large trigger around defensive positions to communicate players or ai´s position to defenders and enable them to engage much, much earlier. This includes small caliber stationary weapons but also fieldguns, etc. The players are not used to that as the AI normally doesn´t engage at ranges beyond 400 m´s but with this trick gameplay becomes much more challenging and demanding. I also use forwarded observers in trees or buildings to direct artillery on enemies. Works like a charm and has a fairness factor as the observer can be killed and the source of enemy information is gone :-)

Yes, there´s a script you can just drag/drop onto your character to make this work. It´s really that simple. There is some AI code embedded with the downloadable tutorials but there are also user-created modules that are more sophisticated in terms of defining areas where AI can move upon and pathfinding in general. I used a pathfinding system with waypoints for a realtime architectural visualizations where I have live traffic going on. It is basic though but it does the job for me. Advanced AI like taking cover, leaning and things like that are possible with scripting I guess but up to now I haven´t seen examples. Right now the AI just works like this: - enemy freely moves in it´s predefined sector or scans for targets within given range - If player-tagged object moves into sensor range of enemy he will switch to his combat routines wich means that he either calculates a path towards the player to reach his maximum shooting distance or for stationary weapons waits until the players gets in range moves the gun into the player´s direction and fires. Projectiles can be fired by particle emitters that actually emit physics objects that interact with the surrounding. Each projectile can have weight, mass, speed and affects the environment. Shooting boxes moves them if the projectiles are strong enough, barrels can explode if there damage points are exceeded. It´s just a matter of what you embedd. I´m curious what the new Unity version will offer in the AI compartement but we´ll see soon. :pet7:

The engine only exports things to a standalone that are actually used in your project, so yes, it´s up to you to decide what you want to have in it or not. Concept - creation of objects in external application - texturing/animation - import into Unity by Drag/Drop with latest FBX importer - embedding into your scene by drag/drop. Unity also checks your project folder automatically for updated models, textures, scripts, whatever and automatically imports the latest version directly into your scenery which is helpful as you don´t have to import and embedd the updated things over and over again with going through all the material, scripting, behaviour or shader settings. Shading is the biggest visual part of a game. It either makes your objects look tasty, with structure, per pixel shadowing, shiny, reflective, etc, etc or when using very basic shaders it makes your objects just look plain coloured with no depth. In unity you can apply several materials consisting of different shaders to one object in a row. For example you have a base texture a shiny layer above the base texture and a reflecting shader on top of it all to reflect the environmet or a cubemap that is generated to represent environmetal reflection. There are programs to create shaders, or plugins for the common modelling programs like 3dsmax or Maya. In Unity you can program your own shaders for best results but it takes time to get into CG shader programming as it directly addresses the funtions of gfx-cards and therefore there are limits to it. It´s not directly linked to lighting as the light emitters only emit lights and draw soft or hard shadows, the calculations on what happens with an object that is lighted is a shader thing as the material of an object defines how it looks when light is applied to it.

The new Torque engine has not been released yet and the old one is too clumsy if you want to have a good workflow. OGRE is widespread but also a bit dated by now. Object import from different software platforms can be a real pita. I´ve worked with Quest 3D for a while but it simply misses some very basic features and the tree structure makes you vomit at times the bigger your project gets. Apart from that it´s not really cheap and documentation and support is lacking in many, many aspects. I´ve switched to Unity lately as it was finally released for PC. It comes with a load of tutorials, the mechanics are great, the workflow is very fast, it has a drag/drop option for almost anything and it can be scripted in Boo, JavaScript or C. The community is great, the developers are supportive and there is a different spirit as with Quest 3d as people share for example unity-packages that you can just drag/drop into your project and use. I love it so far. It has all current shading options embedded, performs well and is continously under development while the developers listen closely to customer wishes. Late this summer there will be a new version for the PC and I´m already biting my nails for the new functions like a live radiosity renderer. Oh, and the price is neat aswell :pet7: Unity 3D Quest 3D

The trees: Using planes with alpha textures and arrange them in a 90° offset is one way, especially if you want to compute accurate shadows. Another way I use for unaccessible terrain is to have a single plane with an alpha texture of the tree and have a script attached to the tree that continously check the players position and sets the facing of the tree accordingly. This way the player will always see the tree from the right angle while it´s just a simple plane. For shadowing the scene I use baked shadowmaps or blob projectors as the shadow of the rotating tree would change when it turns. In a current project I have done it that way: - Near to player: either 3D models of trees with high textures and precision or tress made of two planes. Both of them static - For far away trees: Single planes with transparent tree texture and the script to rotate towards player with either blob-shadow or baked shadowmap. Another way is to create vegetation on the fly while the player is moving around. Predefined trees, bushes, billboard grass actually are placed with a script on the fly to save performance. Still, this method is more complicated than the above and often doesn´t really work if the script isn´t really perfect as the rules of placement are hard to define sometimes. I guess it depends on what you want to do, your setting, your area, the freedom you want to grant to players. Especially keeping everything dynamical, like pixel shadows, bumpmaps, etc is really a big performance eater. Still there are projects where you need to have it for realism reasons. Sharing textures is a good way to save ressources. With different UV set´s you can apply a single texture to multiple objects and save ressources.

The story is quite nice and the setting in the civil war is really fun. The Gfx are great and it runs perfectly smooth on highest settings here. The scenery is really stunning at times. The difficulty settings definately give you a really hard time when you play on the highest setting that is unlocked when finishing it for the first time. Arcade ends there. You´ll die more than you play. AI is nice aswell. They don´t just run up to you, but make use of cover efficiently, duck, get on the floor, peak from corners and shoot really fast and precise. The ambience of villages, towns and prairie is portrayed very nice and you can enter alot of buildings, even breaching through windows to get access to houses or entering them from the rooftops. I also like the feature to throw lamps into buildings to smoke out the baddies. A lot of the building exterior and interior is destructable, so if you face an enemy that is hiding on a balcony, why not just shoot his cover to pieces. I had a playtime of about 10 hours to finish it first on medium difficulty and now I´m playing it again on superhard where the fun really starts. The story is very speed-driven but you don´t always have to run after the objectives, instead you can explore the surrounding and troll around. Later on there are free-roam parts where you can ride around, help settlers, clear farms, hunt cattle-thiefs, snipe some bandits from rocks and collect some goodies before you proceed with your mainquest. I have/had much fun with the game, the soundtrack is tasty, the characters are nice, some shootouts are terrific and demanding and the effects when hit are just plain great as they make you run for cover to get back your vision and stamina. The campaign length is a bit too short imo, but I never get enough of things I like anyway. I don´t really understand what people think when they say it´s arcady. Play it on ultrahard and get your realism :-)

I´m only partly holding my breath as I think that the series somewhat degraded with the last parts. While the gfx were all nice and dramatic, the gameplay itself never really got a needed overhaul. The damage model was too simple at points and there was not much variety on enemy ships. The all had the same paintjob, no matter what. For me this felt very repetative after a while. Spot two C3´s line up to them at a 90° angle, wait till they are passing, do the torpedo maths, adjust torpedo depth according to book and weather and fire. Repetative. The "save survivors" didn´t work for me, so the deck gun also had something to do after sinking a ship. Of course this all looked nice graphically but I lost the fun on the way there. Mission design in the pacific theater was a joke at best and several bugs, like trying to sink a big ship in shallow water that simply doesn´t sink just because the water is too low, magically blowing up the own ship while crashdiving, crashing destroyers who had their path plotted quite badly and sunk themselves right over me and things like that do not really make me smile. Either they do a real overhaul with SH5, or I´m skipping it.

Nice :pet7: I´m currently working and experimenting with Unity engine and found out about this "look" by accident when rendering two viewports over each other with a DOF setting that concentrates exactly on a centred object that the camera(s) orbit around. One camera renders full details of the objects while the other one blurs out the surrounding. It´s quite funny as there are several moving vehicles in the scene and it looks incredibly toyish when they get into the detailed focus.

Cool, we get some classic OFP bugs again ?:pray: It´s kind of weird that they are up for an expansion while the already released product still has so many deficits and bugs. Funny that there is an expansion while I still can´t end the original campaign because of the bugs. I appreciate the effort but I guess BIS really needs to rethink it´s business strategies at some point and at first put all their energy into bugfixing and optimizing the existing game before rushing to new horizons that will unfortunally create another load of bugs and problems. :pet7:

I wished we had a button like this for threads like that. Ummm...I guess we need a poll about it. :pet7:

A "Render-to-texture" channel has been asked for since Arma 1. I guess chances are low that we´ll see it from BIS.

There would be a way for BIS to tune the hitpoint system so that it takes initial weapon damage into calculations without having to rebuild the whole system. The solution is rather simple technically, all they need to do is adding a few lines to the damage detector for classes or vehicles that specify a minimum hitpoint damage for an object. Unless the minimum damage isn´t reached with one impact of a projectile the hitpoints will not be counted for the object. This means that for example a damage influence of small arms would not be counted or summed up for small arms fire but only counted when the impact damage goes above a certain number. If an AT weapon hits the vehicle the damage value is much higher than with small arms, therefore the limit set by the object would be overcome and the damage counted for the vehicle. This way you could never destroy an armored vehicle with small arms but only with weapons that deliver a significant amount of damage with one shot. This system should be easy to implement as the engine checks the sum of damage delivered on impact, comparing it to the minimum damage needed for a vehicle to affect it and then either apply the damage to the vehicle or not. Taking this further it could be possible to parent subsystems of vehicles to the whole vehicle with different damage values and minimum damage-values as mentioned above. For example a turret has a different set of hitpoints and minimum damage needed to affect it than the rear of a tank. Once the minimum damage needed to affect the component is overcome and the damage counts the hitpoints can be summed up unless the component is "destroyed". By parenting the component to the main tank it would mean that once the component is technically destroyed the parent would be destroyed aswell. As the system is flexible it could also mean that destroying certain components could have different effect. Destroying tracks would immobilize the vehicle while not destroying it completely, while destroying the turret would kill the vehicle as a whole. I don´t know how Arma 2´s engine handles 3D objects specifically, but as the turret is moveable on it´s own there must be some kind of parenting system in use, so the above "solution" looks quite reasonable to me and could be implemented without too much hassle while delivering a big portion of realism. BIS correct me if I´m totally wrong.